by YZWVilma » Thu Sep 07, 2023 5:18 pm
It’s become a trend in recent years, but the diet has been used by doctors for nearly a century-and researchers are still exploring ways it can help patients. Last week saw another spate of anti-keto headlines stemming from an authoritative report, this time from the American Heart Association (AHA), warning that the "keto" (ketogenic) diet is bad for heart health. In the case of the dozens of news items on a presentation given at the American College of Cardiology conference in March, these reported that a "keto" or "keto-like" diet is associated with higher LDL-cholesterol and greater risk of cardiovascular events. In the case of the ACC reports, for instance, there’s not even a pre-print of the study to justify the dozens of headlines. Still, the ACC issued a press release on Iatan’s utterings. I asked the ACC if the group had any evidentiary standards for issuing a press releases, i.e., why merely spoken words at a conference would justify such media amplification, and a representative explained that sometimes "clinical research data" were selected for press releases--although Iatan’s study was not clinical research (it was an observational study, a much weaker form of evidence). None of these findings could be confirmed, however, because the lead researcher for this study, Iulia Iatan, a physician-researcher for the University of British Columbia and Healthy Heart Program Prevention Clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, only spoke about her research at the conference.